blarney/rubble

The now explosion

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 12:11:25 GMT

I'm on vacation!

This should have been the time that I wound down my duties at work, and passed everything over to the folks in Europe, but it looks like lingering contractual obligations to some (mostly non-Europe) clients are leaving me in limbo — there's seemingly no one left in the company who can handle their cases. The Europers won't.

But, for the next ten days, barring any sudden crises, I'm going to try to put it out of my mind. We're road-tripping to Toronto.

I tend to doze off at night to WNYC's broadcast of On Point, a show I term "the second most depressing talk show on radio" — John Batchelor's return to the air (on WABC and KFI, Sunday nights) means that he has reclaimed the top spot. Last night's On Point featured an attempt at lighter fare for an hour: "Count Basie and the American Soundtrack".

It was a time of Depression and FDR, Joe Louis and Amelia Earhart. It had a soundtrack. And Count Basie was a huge part of it.

Do we have a soundtrack today? Gnarls Barkley? Beck?

And I'm thinking, this is a ridiculous Freedom Rock view to take.

I doubt that folks in the early heyday of the Basie band thought in terms of having a collective soundtrack to their lives; it seems more a construct of later decades — a means of selling Pepsi to The Pepsi Generation, or Glenn Miller's greatest hits to their parents and grandparents, or NOW That's What I Call Classic Rock! shovelware to their children and grandchildren. (Plus, "everything ever recorded" is theoretically at our fingertips, to an extent unthinkable in previous generations. I've now heard Gracie Allen's singing voice. I love her so much that I'm willing to forget having heard her sing.)

My mother and grandfather-in-law were of different ages in 1938, child and adolescent, respectively, and they no doubt heard some Basie on the radio back then, and grooved to his music in later decades, and would groove to it now, were I to put on a Basie CD. It was my parents' love of the music that made it a part of my '60s soundtrack, not quite as much a presence in my life back then as JohnPaulGeorgeAndRingo, or "Build Me Up, Buttercup" or Ramsey Lewis' "The In Crowd" (now resurrected on Don Imus' TV simulcast), but present nonetheless. And the Allman Brothers music that was foisted on me by AOR stations back in the day, well, it's present now (and this time around I actually like it!), no need of any help from NOW!

But enough of this collective hallucination of some narrow array of supposed era-defining musics. 1938 (or so) was probably also about Dennis Day or Xavier Cugat, or Mahalia Jackson or Roy Acuff, depending on where you sat. That '30s was part of my '70s. ~~NOW!~~Now here's some '60s music. (Eat your damn paisley, you dirty hippies!)

This birthday post arranged by Gil Evans

Sun, 25 May 2008 15:36:27 GMT

Whenever I'd go to Maxwell's or listen to some indie band of the moment (whether on the radio, or on New York Noise, or, increasingly, on TV commercials), I'd hear Evil Uncle Miles' distinctive whisper-rasp in my head, asking, "Didn't we do it good the first time?" He was talking, when the question was originally uttered, about the first wave of Brooks-Brothers-suited jazz neo-classicists, the peers and spawn of young Wynt0n (himself begat by mid-'60s Miles), but it applies equally to more high-profile musics.

WKCR played a couple of cuts from E.S.P. last night, and I was reminded: damn, they did do it good the first time. And Miles himself was around the top of his game, two decades after his stint as a teenage not-quite-phenom with big ears.

The cover of The Musings of Miles, 1955.

It would be another dozen years before he would dress this silly in public again. (And then he would outdo himself with each successive year.) Miles would have been 82 today; alas, he's having another hip-replacement operation in Rock'n'Roll Heaven.

Happy 67th birthday!

Sat, 24 May 2008 11:48:43 GMT

Truckin'

Sat, 10 May 2008 14:57:14 GMT

Pictured, left to right: Greg~~ory "Ironman"~~ Tate (moderator), Matana Roberts, Amina Claudine Myers, Douglas Ewart, George Lewis (author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music), Iqua Colson, Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith.

Oh? You can't see the picture? But I brought a camera!

PLEASE NOTE:
WE ASK THAT THERE BE NO AUDIO OR VIDEO TAPE RECORDING, NO PHOTOGRAPHING, AND NO SMOKING AT THIS CONCERT. WE MUST WARN YOU THAT ANYONE FOUND VIOLATING THESE RULES WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE PROMPTLY....

I'd weighed myself down with a bulky old-school digital camera, tucked in my laptop bag, along with a giant college-ruled notebook, Mr. Lewis' 700-page tome, umbrella, heavy gloves and woolen hat (for it was rainy and wind-chilled outside), and assorted PDA/phone chargers and docks. Not even room for a laptop. I lugged this rig 25 blocks from my office to the Community Church (Unitarian! My mother will be so happy!) to see the big event and take pictures.

The event was a panel discussion (for the launch of the book), combined with a book signing, and a trio set by "The Trio" — Lewis (on trombone), Smith (on trumpet and a wonderfully odd-looking flügelhorn), and AACM co-founder and national treasure Muhal Richard Abrams (piano). It was also, essentially, the first AACM (New York chapter) concert of the season, though the next few are several months away.

(Also not pictured: Tate had a copy of what looked like a paperback edition of the book. WTF?)

The panel discussion was great, a wonderful coda or adjunct to the book, but it ended abruptly after about 45 minutes, only really scratching the surface, since there were two other things on the agenda. This could have been an ideal five-hour event for BookTV, or, edited down perhaps, something for Channel 13, the local PBS flagship. (After all, how often do you get a group like this together for a public discussion?)

That ties in, a little, with the book's subtitle. "American Experimental Music" tends (Lewis' efforts in recent years notwithstanding) to conjure up images of Cage, Cowell, and Ives; Partch and Feldman; Fluxus, minimalists, and whomever Kyle Gann's writing about this week. Maybe even David Byrne and Thurston Moore and circuit-benders du jour. And they can get on BookTV or American Masters or NPR or in "arts coverage" somewhere, while other American Experimentalists like Blind Lemon Jefferson, or Dizzy Gillespie, or Roscoe Mitchell, get lumped into the bluesandjazz category — snap yo' fingus chillun! — and relegated to a drive-by mention during Black History Month, rather than some expansive, scholarly or hoity-toity treatment.

The 45-minute trio improvisation that concluded the evening (on a high note, both figuratively and literally, IIRC) was indicative of some of the un-jazz-sounding varieties of "AACM music", explorations of sound, space, and "Eurocentric" chromaticism, the sort of stuff for which Anthony Braxton caught much grief back in the day (Lewis and Smith are alumni of Braxton's groups). Added bonus #1: the Community Church has the best acoustics I've heard in any NYC venue thus far. Added bonus #2: having listened mainly to 31 flavo(u)rs of bop over these last few months — part of my ongoing osmosification campaign before resuming my education — it was a nice change of pace to revisit the work of some of the people who originally inspired me to change my major to music.

In the last few minutes of the set, relaxing in the sound, I started dozing off, unfortunately; I'd been up for 18 hours straight, capping off a week in which I failed to get more than one good night's sleep.

It's a few weeks short of the 28th anniversary of the first concert I ever attended (without being dragged by a parent): a pre-Wadada, pre-dreadlocks Leo Smith, touring the east coast (an art gallery in Richmond, in this case) with vibraphonist Bobby Naughton. I was a post-punk teenager who'd become besotted with Braxton and Charlie Parker — thanks to major-label campaigns in support of new releases, unthinkable today. I've slowly worked my way from two different points of jazz (or "jazz") history to some spot in the middle. (Cannonball Adderley? My mother will be so happy!) Long, strange trip, etc., etc....

Ah-Leu-Cha

Sun, 04 May 2008 17:24:16 GMT

I'm not keen on birthdays, or presents, but the missus badgered me into the latter (the former is inevitable, of course). I was on amazon.com one day, ordering some new CO₂ cartridges for my seltzer bottle (seltzer + juice concentrate = soda-like beverage without HFCS), and I talked her into paying for the purchase and letting that suffice for a present.

That deal lasted about 10 seconds, 'til she decided it wasn't birthday-y enough. "Pick out some more stuff!"

I chose a Zoot Sims / Al Cohn boxed set, then had misgivings because I wasn't sure if I didn't already have the material in other formats. So I got this:

Charlie guards the birthday present. Good boy!

George "Don't ask me when it's coming out!" Lewis' decade-in-the-making history of the AACM. Stay tuned for my next birthday, when Charlie will be pictured with Stanley Crouch's Charlie Parker bio, the Chinese Democracy of jazz boox.

I've been lax in posting pictures of The Boy because he hasn't photgraphed well so far — indoors, we need to tweak the flash (previously adjusted for a night of Pere Ubu photos at the Knitting Factory), but haven't figured out how. Where's the owner's manual? Who knows? So for the first few rounds of shots, Charlie's big eyes catch all of the flash, giving him this sort of sci-fi look:

Agent K-9 takes hummus samples to bring back to planet Zong.

Solution for now: lure Thug Life into well-lit parts of the house. Say cheese!

"Play Air Lore again, please!"

A little more Giuffre

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:24:18 GMT

Following up from before.

Andrew Durkin has a succinct description of why Jimmy Giuffre was Important: he "helped set the template for the modern composer / improviser / musician who unapologetically, beautifully, and with utmost integrity does his or her own thing," and links to the International Herald Tribune obit (via the NYT, I presume), which features a nice 50-year-old quip from André Hodeir about Giuffre's penchant for the chalumeau register of the clarinet.

David Brent Johnson's obit mentions that WKCR is doing 24 hours of Giuffre's half-century of diverse musics on Monday.

As we were leaving the house last night, Phil Schaap was opening his Saturday show with "Four Brothers", the Giuffre-penned Woody Herman hit from 1947, and I did a little dance — it's rare these days for a piece of music to set my tired, jaded, overmusicked self dancing. (And I was delighted on Friday with my first hearing of a small-group "Four Brothers" from a decade later, surprised that it didn't require four saxes to make it work its magic.)

When I was a kid, I pretty much ignored the musics of the Herman alumni — people like Giuffre, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Flip Phillips — and it stemmed from hearing ads for the soporific jazz-rock-lite Herman big band of the mid-'70s when they played a gig in Raleigh. [And maybe, in slightly-later years, siding with "black" East Coast hard bop over "white" West Coast cool (and over the way-cool Tristanoites), never quite getting that the distinctions were bogus — Art Pepper apprenticed with the black boppers of L.A.'s Central Avenue; Gerry Mulligan was a New Yorker; Clifford Brown and Max Roach birthed their iconic hard-bop quintet in Eric Dolphy's garage/studio in Los Angeles; Bird dug Tristano; and everybody dug Lester Young.]

Now I'm Crazy For Zoot, et. al. Crazy for Zoot and Al, even. Yeah, so they didn't wield a tenor like the Flaming Sword of Ohnedaruth, but it's good-time music. This is pop. This is the strain of Cosmic American Music that was an urban/black blind spot in Gram Parsons' ear. Or something. But I digresssssss.

Giuffre's gone

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:44:25 GMT

Score one for Old Media. WKCR announced that Jimmy Giuffre has passed away. I look at my Google Reader for maybe a link to a jazzblogger's R.I.P. and get bupkis. He was too quirky and original to cash in on the West Coast vogue in the '50s, and way too quiet to gain notoriety in the heyday of Free Jazz.... so there isn't even an update yet on Wikipedia — Colbert! Get on the ball!

KCR is playing his music, noon to 3 PM, and 6 to 9 PM today. R.I.P. links to come, perhaps.

Eartrip #1

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 13:29:49 GMT

Issue #1 of Eartrip — out now! All hail the Portable Document Format!

I travel(ed)

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 14:30:33 GMT

More summertime pics: not far out of Stanfield Airport, near Halifax, the deluge began. The billboards, large and small, ground-level and aloft, every few miles, it seemed, proclaiming McLOBSTER, and McLOBSTER IS HERE. By the time we got to Cape Breton Island, McLobster had made its way onto the itinerary.

We never could get a good shot of one of the highway billboards, but here's one that greets you as you drive onto the grounds of the Casa de los Golden Arches:

Here's the McLobster, which is, I suppose, a miniature Lobster Roll.

(On that same day there was a piece on CTV Newsnet about the closing of the restaurant that boasted of having invented the Lobster Roll.) McLobster was OK; McD's made its billions on achieving and standardizing OK-ness and McLobster is worthy of its "Mc". I made a mental note to try a Real Lobster Roll, but have yet to do so; now that I've found a good gluten-free baguette, I'll have to dig up a recipe.

Next visit, I'll try the McHaggis.

We bought our first (family) car a few months ago — I'd gone about 10 years without one; the missus sold hers in 2000. The new car is a used Honda Element, bought more for looks than for any winning performance features; the gas mileage could be better, for instance.

And it would be nice to have some decent oomph for those swaths of the Bayonne-to-Newark-to-the-outer-burbs highways, for getting out of dicey situations; it's as if Tracy Jordan designed these roads and transitions, erring on the side of maximum potential for mayhem.

Our first road trip will be some time this spring; it's the next stop on my Vote With Your Feet tour, Toronto, where the plan had been to visit York University and the University of Toronto. But permanently leaving the country is more of a long shot now; the loonie has reached and sustained parity, and our attempt to sell the house at inflated 2005-2006 prices was shot down by the onset of a new word in the national vocabulary: subprime.

So it's less and less likely we can take profits on the house and pay (mostly) cash on a condo near or within sane commuting distance of, say, U of T, or McGill in Montreal. Even more, it's cold in the winter; it's a fairly mild winter this year in NewYorkNewJersey, and I can't take it.

Which is to say: the current sweet spot is now South Florida; my last two campus visits were Florida Atlantic University and Florida International University, with the latter now the front-runner. Gracefully ditching the rat-race trumps gracefully leaving the country.

In the midst of running the numbers on all of this, and setting a date for the end of next year [when the 401(k) is fully-vested], the two technical leads for our team at work left the company. Rather than replace them, the project is being, essentially, traded to the London office. So I'm out of a job, a lot earlier than planned.

But not really; there's a similar job waiting for me, and perhaps other assignments, as things develop. And, with the loss of the leads, I'm left as The Senior Guy, which is like having the Undersecretary of Agriculture pick up the pieces of government after the decimation of Washington. For much of the remainder of the year, I have to explain an underdocumented codebase and Way of Doing Things to managers and developers and support in Europe, while at the same time doing my day-to-day product support, data-scrubbing, and bug-chasing activities. The actual bugfixes have to wait; I merely describe and document them for now.

My general advice to our new European overlords was/is: you need to focus on making this scale better, to be able to take on several more clients without having to drastically increase the person-hours involved in supporting/maintaining/extending the software. Failure to do this has been a major cause of the product's unprofitability; furthermore, it will take a little time and money to do, and I'm assuming the folks in London are as loath to invest in this as the stateside folks were. We are small potatoes in the vast soup that is the parent corporation.

We have a codebase born in a small Silicon Alley company, five or six years ago, that needs to be adapted and tweaked a bit, now that the computers and sysadmins sit in one time zone, and personnel/management sit in other, far-away time zones, with me, the human swiss-army knife, in still another time zone. It's no longer a matter of shouting over to a nearby cubicle to do a quick fix for some immediate problem, but we need to build that sort of ease-of-operation into the code and into our process.

Time until fully-vested: twenty months.

Newcritics celebrated its first birthday a while back, and the question was posed: what piece of media had the biggest impact on you in the past year? Or something like that. A few weeks later, I've come up with an answer.

A few months back, I put on an album once known as Work, with Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins; I was blown away by the shot-out-of-a-cannon exuberance of Sonny's playing on "The Way You Look Tonight", a tune I associated with Sinatra's beer-eyed quarter-to-three rendition featured, over-and-over again, in a (car? beer?) commercial long ago.

I was blown away; the Rollins recording precedes Saxophone Colossus, the LP-that-put-Sonny-on-the-map in the canon, by about 18 months. I looked for something else from this pre-Colossus age, and found only Dig, a circa-1951 Miles Davis album that featured Rollins and Jackie McLean, two young up-and-comers representin' Sugar Hill (peace to my homies).

I was not blown away; the studio echo was a bit off-putting, distracting (we're not yet in the era of the mastery of RVG and his peers); Miles was not at the height of his powers; the Sugar Hill gang sound, compared to their future mature selves, like the apprentices they were. All three, no doubt, were already mentally spending their session fees on dope.

But I still enjoyed it, and when Sonny quoted a snippet of "Wail", the Bud Powell 78 he played on as a teenager, I went over to my transcription notebooks to see if I had it; I did, and proceeded to play portions of the head, over and over, for a few minutes.

I never got around to doing new transcriptions, though now that I've installed fink — for the first time since the days of OS X 10.2 — xmms looks like an OK replacement for the old varispeed deck. For now, I'm revisiting the notebooks, with the goal of filling in what's missing: a few accidentals here and there, and, most importantly, articulation and a sense of phrasing. What's written down is really just a bunch of notes; what's missing is the actual narrative. So the goal for the rest of the year is something like this:

I want to be able to play the transcriptions along with the ~~records~~ MP3s; mainly Bird, since half the solos are from the Savoy and Dial recordings, but I also have some Colossus-era Sonny solos like "Tenor Madness". The current hurdle: getting past the oops! my bad moments every chorus or two.

This may be the first non-techie, non-note-to-wife thing I've written in months.

Behold, the 11-day weekend!

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 15:58:05 GMT

(This is day three.)

My original hope was to just stay in bed for the 11 days, waking each morning to the church bells at sunrise, rather than the piercing mini-sirens of the alarm clock at 4 AM. I can still do this, for the most part, but I can't just stay in bed as much as originally planned. There are (now) two family dinners to attend, and there's the need to be on standby for work emergencies. And I have a barebones computer and CPU still in boxes — I need to set that up with my pre-existing (and soon-to-be-backed-up) hard drives, and install some form of Linux. And what about food? What shall we make? Do we have all the ingredients?

Most importantly, the missus and I have to hash out What To Name The Dog:

He's a young Pekingese, found by my father-in-law, who volunteers at an animal shelter down in Florida. We're headed there in a few weeks to do the adopting; the in-laws are fostering the pup until we get there. His name at the shelter was Chewbacca (or Chewy), but we're keen on doing a renaming.

(This process actually began in Jersey City, where we'd adopted a Havanese named Fuzzy Wuzzy from Liberty Humane Society; the adoption was voided due to the fact that he (uncharacteristically) bit somebody the day before the adoption was to take effect. But we'll be back at the LHS shelter in a couple of months, in search of kittens.)

I can't remember all the names we'd come up with (and discarded), but here's a sampling, leaving out the Havana-inspired ones for Fuzzy...

C. Everett Poop
Topo Gigio
Eli "Lucky" Thompson (though I actually see a slight resemblance to Ben Webster)
(Randall) McMurphy
Murphy (Brown)

His current name is Charlie Murphy (pronounced CHOLLY MURPHAY!, as Dave Chappelle's Rick James might do it), and we'll likely stick with that, out of Name Fatigue.

The desire to augment the animal population at home is actually a desire to replenish it — our two cats, Samina and Monkey, have passed away in the last 14 months, Samina last October (kidney failure) and Monkey last month (stomach tumor). I still have the occasional Samina dream — for she was the one on whom I ~~perfected~~ practiced my cat-whisperer skills; it wasn't until recently that I stopped "seeing" Monkey, always mistaking a crumpled gig bag on one of the dining-room chairs for her.

We did, briefly, have a kitten. One Saturday in early August, I heard some tiny meows coming from the bushes near our back porch. I thought, "Cool! More kitties." Our back yard tends to attract sunbathing cats and kittens during the summer, and they do their part to help fertilize our ~~cannabis plants~~ grass; it's a lot of fun to watch groups of kittens playing back there.

The next morning, there was an insistent bird noise out back, little squawks or shrieks every few seconds. It wouldn't end. I went out to investigate, as did a neighbor, since the sounds turned out to be emanating from her driveway. The sounds were coming from a kitten, all by his/her lonesome, no sign of a mother or siblings around. One thing leads to another, and I've coaxed the kitten into my arms (quieting him/her down), and into the house.

We were able, after a few hours, to get him/her to eat and drink without the need for a teat; we made little progress in effective litter box training. Monkey wasn't too thrilled by all of this — she'd run away in fear (of fleas?) at the sight of little Squeaky. The vet wasn't too thrilled at seeing a(n approximately) three-week-old kitten; he wanted us to bring him/her back in a few weeks — Squeaky was too young to be given shots, and was apparently too young to show evidence of being definitively male or female.

It was all a bad idea: we were leaving for Nova Scotia in a couple of days; our last-minute attempt to find a shelter or pet-hotel to take him/her in for a few days failed, and we were reduced to putting Squeaky out in the back yard, with a few days of food and drink in a carrier. Since then, we've seen what looks like Squeaky, back in a posse with the mommy and siblings.

At least we still have the fleas.

Ears of a child

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 23:51:03 GMT

If practicing the recorder is a second job, it's very hard to fit 2.0 jobs into the 1.4-sized slot that a weekday affords; weekends — getting things done (e.g. groceries, sleep) that there's no time for during the week — aren't much better. So whether or not I'm at a loss for (blog) words, I'm certainly at a loss for energy; that makes it a good time to play with HTML, when the "Update Journal" link is staring you in the face. Here's my second attempt at embedding; by using something more embed-friendly (from YouTube this time), this should work much easier.

I first saw this a while back via Destination: Out's del.icio.us links. I'd not yet had the chance to listen to Giuseppi Logan's ESP recordings (still haven't), only some ensemble work on Roswell Rudd's Everywhere, so he stood in my mind mostly as some short-lived mid-'60s NYC phenom who'd quickly fallen off the map — I first heard of him via Amiri Baraka's Black Music collection, and (then) through a 1980-ish interview with Jackie McLean or Woody Shaw, just a quick lament sorta thing: "Y'know who I saw [on the street(s)]? Giuseppi damn Logan."

A short film by Edward English, from 1966:

Rather than re-answer 179 questions...

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:09:19 GMT

I did this a couple of days ago; I saved the image link, but forgot to save the scores — I think 74 for Aspie and the low 100's for neurotypical — plus I forgot the link to the test, but managed to grab one from someone else's post.

In the pre-quiz, I'd answered "self-diagnosed" for Asperger's; at some point in the coming months, I'll confirm it or rule it out with the help of a non-virtual professional, but, for now, I'm six weeks into a wheat-free, dairy-free ("GFCF") diet. Aside from the occasional pang of regret when passing a Wendy's (I CAN'T HAS CHEEZBURGER!!!), it's been fairly easy to adhere to the diet; it helps that the missus has celiac, so we've been gluten-aware for the last six years or so.

I don't think there's supposed to be any short-term benefit from this, other than perhaps a small placebo effect; I want to go at least 6-12 months before abandoning the diet, or the notion that I ~~CAN HAS~~ have Asperger's.

Actually there has been one short-term effect — a loss of body fat. I'm well on my way toward unintended six-pack abs.

"Buy a piece of Jazz history while saving WKCR."

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:09:01 GMT

Right here. I'm posting this from a text browser, so I don't know if this post will even show up.

Unofficial bilingualism

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 23:35:25 GMT

…means don't expect to be able to plead your case in Gaelic to the cop that pulls you over for speeding.

The corner of Main and College, Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

Drums unlimited

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 15:36:43 GMT

Through attrition, the only childhood Max Roach album that remains in memory (and in physical reality, sitting somewhere in New Jersey or North Carolina) is Lift Every Voice and Sing, from 1971. In an era when jazz musicians were "exploring" soul, rock, and funk, as a means of maintaining some semblance of commercial viability (and while Jackie McLean would lampoon it, even he recorded a disco LP for RCA a few years later), Max did this relatively-scholarly album with a gospel choir, plus William Bell and Max's newly-ex-wife, Abbey Lincoln.

It isn't the greatest introduction to his music (or to Billy Harper, who played tenor in his quintet back then), but how many kids these days get introduced to (t)his music at all? Or even recognize it as music?

I figured we wouldn't have Max around much longer; Phil Schaap, months ago at least, stopped doing his trademark yell, GOOD MORNING, MAX! at the first, inevitable, mention of Max's name during his daily "Bird Flight" radio show (yelling because I presume Max, like Art Blakey, another drummer/bandleader who launched dozens of musicians' careers, had drummed himself into the ranks of the hard-of-hearing); Joe McPhee stopped just short of eulogizing him at the end of a Trio X gig this past winter or spring.

We've lost a living encyclopedia of percussion, someone who kept learning and learning, growing and growing, teaching and teaching, from the Swing Era through numerous Jazz-Is-Dead eras in the subsequent decades.

I'm slogging through Stanley Crouch's anthology Considering Genius; in an essay devoted to Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall, he tells the story of how Max interrupted the 1961 concert, a benefit for the African Medical Education and Research Foundation, in a one-man protest against what he believed was a pro-apartheid, pro-colonialist organization. That Miles would abandon the concert, half-finished (tho' the show did eventually Go On), is emblematic of the respect he had for his former bandmate; that Max would do this at all was emblematic of the extent (especially in those days) to which he didn't let his activities as a public citizen fall subservient to his activities as a Bankable Name.

I can't imagine Jay-Z or Beyoncé (a bubblegum Max-and-Abbey for the hypercorporate age) disrupting someone else's gig for anything except self-promotion.

We've lost more than a living encyclopedia of percussion.

Cold / Sweat

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 13:14:32 GMT

When it comes to air conditioning, there seems to be this NYC-office-building lowest-common-denominator of erring on the side of too much over too little. The worst offender is one particular conference room at the office; it rivals the one in the company's old location, the one where my long tag-team job interview took place; they may have hired me just for being hardy enough to withstand the near-freezing temperatures that afternoon.

The old building had the eighth circle of air-conditioning hell (with walk-in restaurant refrigerators being the ninth); the current location contains merely the sixth circle. I keep a heavy denim shirt at my desk, to wear during the 45-90 minutes each week that I spend in that conference room. Because I tend to walk fast during the commute (as a way of squeezing in some exercise each day), I sweat profusely, even if it's 50 degrees outside; if it weren't for that, I'd bundle up every day, in preparation for the air conditioning.

Our team lead was out-of-action with a bad cold early this week, but he was reachable by phone. Whenever someone at the office would talk to him on the phone, I could hear the other party say something along the lines of, "Hi…. [pause to hear reply] Damn! You sound awful!" (And now that the lead is back in person, he sounds, when he speaks, like he has a fistful of marbles shoved up his nose. He's still in "bad cold" territory.)

I have the same cold, I think; sporadic headaches — "is it sinuses or a brain tumor?" — had been worrying me since late last week, but feel now, more and more, like a plain-old head cold in the making, and my throat feels a little scratchy (something I can't attribute to smoking: I've been nearly pot-free, and not tobaccoing as much as usual). I've been taking Airborne, holding the symptoms at bay, but eventually I'll be in bad-cold territory.

Of course, this means I'll likely be sick just in time for my week off from work.

The pentatonic spree

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 01:04:27 GMT

from the workaholics-anonymous dept.

I've been moving the goalposts on myself. Starting out on the recorder, the goal was just to learn and play some Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk tunes — Fun At Parties!™ — but, like, shouldn't you be able to improvise on 'em too? So, the goal became to improvise in the 40's/50's bop idiom as well. Now…

…I'm slowly getting together a syllabus to cover the next couple of years of recorder stuff — it's still about three years before I can afford to quit work and prepare for school, and four/five years before I'd actually be enrolling/auditioning (auditioning on guitar, since what school teaches Jazz Performance for recorder players?). And the idea is to, rather than Party Like It's 1947, make the year 1969 instead — think not of (cue the "1969" riff) The Stooges, but of forward-thinking mainstream folks like the Jazz Messengers of around that time, a bunch of twentysomethings (not counting their 50-year-old peerless leader) toiling away in near-obscurity without a record deal, in the wake of jazz falling off the pop-cultural map after Coltrane died and Miles started letting Betty Mabry pick out his clothes for him.

For textbooks, I've got an old David Baker improv book that covers some post-bop practices — pentatonics (the current focus); quartal lines; the "Coltrane matrix" (i.e. that which jes grew out of "Giant Steps"), etc. I've also got one of Dave Liebman's 90's tomes, a Domesday Book of chromaticism in jazz, a superset of what Baker covers.

For non-dead-tree textbooks, the idea, for now, is to (try to) transcribe a bunch of Coltrane, primarily the material from the 1961 Village Vanguard recordings and subsequent European tour. (Added bonus: Eric Dolphy as a floating member of the group; this will be my first-ever attempt at transcribing him.) In my old notebooks of transcriptions, done in the 80's/90's, the vast majority consists of Parker's Savoy and Dial recordings from the 40's (my original impetus for transcribing, out of "what's he doing?" fascinated curiosity), plus occasional forays into the likes of Sonny Rollins, Kenny Burrell, Bud Powell (right hand), and a little bit of Trane, ending (in terms of the jazz-historical timeline) with one of the takes of "Chasin' the Trane" from the Vanguard sets. C'est à dire, I've got the Old Old Old World covered; it's a good time to start exploring the Old Old World…

…and to actually apply all this material to something, since the ongoing "what's he doing?" fascinated curiosity was/is from the vantage point of someone whose playing experience has been limited to (in-school) classical guitar and (out-of-school) punk/post-punk/indie bands, when not generally waylaid by stage fright and/or ennui and/or The Day Job.

For over a decade, my home-electronics pride-and-joy was a Marantz varispeed "portable" (the size and weight of 2.5 iBooks) cassette player; all my previous transcribing was done on it, but it broke about 10 years ago, and I had no money at the time to fix or replace it.

(The importance of varispeed is that the novice — me, in this case — needs to have the option of slowing down the recording in order to discern what the master is playing, when said master is, say, playing semiquaver triplets at 240 BPM.)

Now I'm working on the replacement: I impulse-purchased an old el-cheapo ThinkPad 600 a week ago — a refurbished Pentium II/300 running a pre-refurbishment Windows 2000 (i.e. I'm proudly avoiding the Microsoft Tax); the idea is to install Linux on it, and use alsaplayer for its varispeed capabilities. Unfortunately… 1) it has an ancient BIOS, one that causes a Linux distro to balk at installation; 2) the necessary BIOS upgrade requires a floppy drive, which this ThinkPad ain't got. [And 3) the battery's shot, but the retailer had already warned me about that.]

So, I'll get around to getting the drive, the BIOS, the new battery, the Linux… but, temporarily, I'll allow this portable virus-magnet on the home network; I installed Winamp last night, and a varispeed plug-in called PaceMaker. One thing the digital approach has over the Marantz is DSP — you can slow down a recording while maintaining the original pitch; PaceMaker seems to do it fairly well, but I'm not sure yet if alsaplayer has this capability. (Note to self: maybe there's a plug-in for XMMS.)

I gave Winamp a try last night, recorder in hand, getting used to Winamp's stop/start/pause/rewind key-bindings (mouse/pointer navigation is out of the question), resisting the temptation to grab a pencil and staff paper. I'd copied a couple of European-tour bootlegs to the virus-magnet last weekend, and, at the top of the list in Windows Explorer was a rendition of the then-hit "My Favorite Things". This is probably (aside from being 20+ minutes long sometimes — keep in mind that the Parker Savoy/Dial stuff had to fit onto a three-minute 78 RPM disc) a good choice for starters: the general arc seems to be piano-intro, short Trane intro and theme statement on soprano sax with a little embellishment, then a long piano solo building up to the actual balls-out soprano solo (and, if Dolphy's present, a relatively laid-back flute solo from him); this offers a way to get my feet wet without having to constantly ~~give the fuck up~~ resort to slowing down flurries of notes.

It took several minutes to get the gist of the first 45 seconds of the recording; this isn't great, but I'm coming off a ten-year layoff. /me cuts me some slack.

The ennui is long-gone (abstinence makes the heart grow fonder); I still have a few years to work on the stage-fright issue; and, while I most certainly still suck as a recorderista, I take comfort in the fact that I'm a far, far better player than I was in fifth grade.

Name that raga!

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 11:29:33 GMT

The missus put on WKCR in the middle of the night — their third-shift new-music show "Transfigured Night" — and my first thought was "Cecil Taylor", hearing the clusters and rumblings on the piano. But, after about 15 seconds, I knew it wasn't him, but certainly an improvisor out of the same European tradition. I was curious as to who it was and what CD it was, so I sat up in bed, enjoying the music, waiting for the DJ to back-announce what was being played. "Don't they have an accuplaylist, like FMU?" the missus asked. I laughed, visualizing the rarely-updated KCR website.

The music went from solo piano to a piano/drums duet, to a sax+rhythm free improv to electroacoustic and chamber-orchestral trappings, before I figured out that this wasn't a CD being played. Still, I waited for the back-announce. Then I fell asleep.

I woke up, and the DJ was playing some Cecil for real — there was no mistaking the intensity, the authority, the glissando-clusters (or whatever you want to call them). I listened to the last few minutes of the broadcast, and finally the DJ speaks, but only to say the show's over, and the playlist will be posted later.

Playlist? They have playlists?

Well, yes, as it turns out. They're not on the station's site, but on Blogger: the New Music department (Name That Pianist!); the In All Languages department (Name That Raga!); the weekly "Honky Tonkin'" honky-tonkin' show…

Maybe there's more, listed in some central location that isn't just some crank's blog post. Who knows?

Your Anthony Braxton quote of the week

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:14:29 GMT

#167 in a series

I believe that one of the problems of this time period is that we don’t understand the old Ghost, the old masters. We have been given a viewpoint of the masters that takes away the aura of the Ghosts. All of it looks like artifacts and more and more children are not able to gain some sense of the real culture. But trance music means that individuals can do individual experiences and they can tap into anything, including the essence of the masters, of the old masters.

— from the liner notes to Sextet Istanbul 1995

This was quoted in Henry Kuntz's review of the new 9-CD-plus-1-DVD box set of Iridium recordings, the first new Bells article since going on hiatus around 1979.

(Your digressive contrarian rant of the week: I note that the first piece of new content I saw at Crawdaddy!'s resurrected site concerned The Hold Steady, whose Craig Finn fits to a T the rock-bard archetype popularized by the music-as-multimedia-poetry-slam school of criticism — wrongheaded and, ultimately, smothering — that Crawdaddy! helped midwife back in the day. There needs to be some sort of punk-rock Moment of Evisceration for this school — i.e. the laying waste of received Rolling Stone AOR-showbiz "wisdom" — except punk rock is now itself part of their canon.)

We don't bat an eye, nowadays, at the notion of a box set of 9 CDs and a DVD. But I was reminded of Keith Jarrett's Sun Bear Concerts, a wonderfully-packaged, but physically-imposing 9-LP set of solo-piano improvs released in 1976; I remember seeing a copy or two at one of the old Record Bar chain stores a few months after it was released, and just marvelling at it for a few seconds. Who would buy such a thing? The hardcore solo-Jarrett fans, who would eat their vitamins, say their prayers, and prepare for the act of purchasing and carting home this monstrosity.

But now, it's nothing out of the ordinary, a 6-CD box set. Not much bigger than a Big Mac.

But Ben Sidran — he has a new 24-CD release. Neener neener, Keef.

For decades, we thought that Louis Armstrong was born on July 4, 1900 — a perfect birthdate for such a huge American icon. But it wasn't so, and even WKCR now does its Louis marathon in August, his real birth month. Still, with a nod to their previous practice, they play his music all day on July 4, a day in which I tend to celebrate Louis' other life — that of stoner icon.

/me waves to the missus (I'm running late!)

Your Anthony Braxton quote of the week

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 01:39:26 GMT

#161 in a series

On first encountering Roscoe Mitchell in 1963…

"I can not begin to describe it; all I can say is they played the head; he took the first chorus. I said, well, you know, it's okay. He took the second chorus; hmm, fairly interesting; third chorus: whoa, this is kind of interesting; fourth chorus: goddamn, what the fuck; fifth chorus: GODDAMN; sixth chorus: MAMMA, HELP! seventh chorus: KILL ME, FUCK IT; eighth chorus: I'LL JUMP OUT THE MOTHERFUCKING WINDOW, I'M GIVING UP MUSIC AND LIFE!! I'LL BE A MOTHERFUCKING SHOE SALESMAN!!! When Roscoe Mitchell finished his solo on ‘Bye Bye, Blackbird,’ my life had changed. I joined the army a week later… I had to get away from everything I knew about, and try to make some sense out of what was happening, because no longer, by 1963, was music something that I enjoyed or something that was fascinating: it became something that totally dominated my whole psyche, all-encompassing; and it was so powerful that it was basically like someone turning you upside down and shaking you."

— from the Third Millenial Interview, with Mike Heffley.

Vierd blues

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 01:11:14 GMT

So, p1n90u1n, your LiveJournal reveals...

You are... 8% unique (blame, for example, your interest in tuple spaces) and 0% herdlike. When it comes to friends you are normal. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are keen to please. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is intellectual.

Your overall weirdness is: 55

(The average level of weirdness is: 27.
You are weirder than 92% of other LJers.)

Find out what your weirdness level is!

Free, for $20

Mon, 28 May 2007 15:29:56 GMT

Over the last couple of years, I've had my first chance to partake of the Rock Senior Tour, to see, live, various bands-of-70's-origin that I had missed the first time around, due to being too young and/or too out-in-the-boonies. Pere Ubu, Rocket From The Tombs, The Tubes, The Avengers, The Ex… bands that, for various reasons, aren't part of the VH1 Classic sponsored-nostalgia-tour trip, though Fee Waybill declared The Tubes ready, willing and able to grab some of that "$100,000-a-night New Cars money", if asked.

(I missed the most-recent New York ~~Ghouls~~ Dolls reunion, but caught enough of them on a recent DirecTV broadcast to hold me until the next one, or the one after that.)

The Tubes show was one of the best shows I've ever seen, not because I was fueled by the $12 mixed drinks and $10 burgers of BB King's, the Manhattan supper-club that is their NYC venue-of-choice, but because the good humo(u)r and humanity of the band scales perfectly to a place of that size. Much would be lost in going for that VH1 money by playing Corporate Naming Rights Arena with Poison and A Flock of Seagulls; I wouldn't be able to see/hear as much humo(u)r or nuance from the vantage point of my $60 nosebleed arena seats.

But the Rock Senior Tour is mostly about replicating something from 20 to 40 years ago. It's not going to be a life-changing experience like the Dolls/Tubes double bill in 1973 might have been. (Unless, perhaps, it's a parent or grandparent who's dragged you, in 2007, to BB King's or Corporate Naming Rights Amphitheatre.) It's not going to be about showing off 20 to 40 years of musical growth by radically altering your rendition of "Don't Touch Me There." Dance with the one that's brung you.

There isn't really a free-jazz/loft-jazz senior tour; the Brand New Right Now This Minute nature of musics that are fully or mostly improvised doesn't lend itself as much to nostalgia trips. The musicians (and identifiable bands) never reached a sufficient critical mass of mindshare when they were younger (Other Dimensions in Music is a band-of-70's-origin too — Ensemble Muntu with Daniel Carter in place of Jemeel Moondoc. Who? What?), plus they never stopped working. How can you come back if you never went away? How can you come back if my Aunt Tillie in Pembroke has never heard of you to begin with?

But parallel to my Rock Senior Tour activities, I've been able to see Henry Grimes on multiple occasions; Cecil McBee likewise; Kali Fasteau (on her 60th birthday); the 80-year-old Bill Dixon; Cecil Taylor; Charles Gayle (and surely Gayle and Carter are playing a lot more horn in 2007 than they were in 1977); John Tchicai…

…but the senior-tour-est thing I've seen might have been the finale of WKCR's Sam Rivers festival, last Friday night at Columbia University's Miller Theatre: a couple of sets from perhaps the definitive version of the Rivers Trio — Rivers (tenor and soprano saxophones, flute, piano, muted postmodern field-holler); David Holland (bass); Barry Altschul (percussion). (Occasional fourth/fifth members Joe Daley and Warren Smith were in the audience, as were Grimes, Taylor, and other luminaries.) They hadn't shared a stage in over a quarter-century.

Sam Rivers, of the 24 Bond Street loft Studio Rivbea, was the godfather of loft jazz (Ornette Coleman, of Artists House, at 131 Prince Street, was, arguably, the father). But he's 83 years old now, living in sunny Orlando. I didn't want to see Mel Brooks' 2000-Year-Old Man or Wayne and Shuster's doddering hundred-year-old Tony Bennett. Luckily, that's not what I got; this was Sam Rivers, period, an 83-year-old man, excited to be in front of an adoring house, full of joy at having seen and done so much.

He's 83 (as I may have mentioned previously), so there would be, as he implied at the outset, concessions to age: Rivers was seated on a stool during most of his woodwind segments; the breaks between segments were longer, featuring bass/percussion solos/duets (Holland and Altschul, sexugenarians, kicked ass, making no concessions to age); we didn't get any marathon improvs, as might have been the case in decades past, just a wonderful series of short episodes, one flowing into the next, and adding up to a trip through the possibilities of language. A living textbook of jazz freedom, same as ever. Brand New Right Now This Minute.

NP: Henry Threadgill — Air's Greatest Hits Live at the Hard Rock Cafe.

Life after Dolphy

Mon, 28 May 2007 12:42:27 GMT

Dr. Barry Steven Tepperman passed away earlier this month. Before his long career as an oncologist, he was a Dolphyologist and frequent contributor to Coda ("Canada's Jazz Magazine"), and was the by-default Toronto Correspondent for Henry Kuntz's great zine Bells — I had been reading his 1976 Bells piece on a noir-barian invasion of the staid, old-school Toronto "new music" scene, when I wondered what he'd been writing lately. An obit was in the Google results.

Blow, Mr. Dexter

Sat, 26 May 2007 11:22:33 GMT

(Though, in my case, it's still a too-high slobber-to-blow ratio.)

It's been a bad LJ week; first, I get my first two pieces of blog spam — generic subject of (name of comely celeb) + (words to entice you to click the link). The spammer then fumbles by using BBCode to form the link in the body.

Second, I couldn't post this post; once it reached a certain length (greater than the first paragraph), the Preview and Post functions went FUBAR. Here's the post (FWIW):

Yes, another blurry Treo photo:

I'd been waiting for tax-refund time to spend money on a non-cheap (but non-expensive) recorder. The original cheap one is not unplayable, but does have ~~some~~ several notes in the (theoretical) highest octave that require too much overblowing to produce, and this will result in many bad habits, I fear. But before I could buy a new one, the missus bought me a recorder for my birthday — a Mollenhauer Canta alto with double keys for the low F/F#. It's the tan blur in the picture.

The Canta is uniformly playable throughout the octave + major-tenth that I've tried; I'll start adding more upper-register notes, one at a time, until I'm covering the full 2½ octaves. For now, I'm "playing it in" — starting with a maximum 10 minutes a day, then adding 5 minutes to the maximum each week; tomorrow [i.e. yesterday] starts a week of playing it for 25 minutes/day.

The playing-it-in part I knew about from the instructions that came with the cheap recorder. The vendor's instructions this time included advice to not play the instrument more than an hour a day: "Players wishing to practice or rehearse for longer periods of time should plan to acquire several instruments and rotate them accordingly." Oy! Though my daily practice is only up to an hour each day, the general idea is to expand that to 3-4 hours/day. So I'll be buying another alto (or two) soon, once I form an opinion on double keys versus old-school double holes; for now, the keys feel awkward, but it's early yet.

One disappointment (if you don't count the one-hour rule) is that it sounds like a recorder, I guess. (I'm ignorant of what the instrument is supposed to sound like, actually, and should get some recordings.) This new one has a sharp, bright attack and a light tone; the cheap one has a heavier, wooden-flute quality that sounds better (in the context of bop, at least). I'm hoping that some combination of playing-in and paying more attention to articulation will narrow the sound gap. We'll see.

Snake on a plane

Sat, 19 May 2007 05:38:07 GMT

…musics that at one time or another were nestled in the gullet of the snake, opposite from the Long Tail, or had non-Quixotic aspirations to nestle there.

These musics are, all, legitimized by their presence in that gullet, in a the-people-have-spoken sense. In a $LARGE_NUMBER-of-$ELVIS-fans-can't-be-wrong sense. What do you mean you don't like Perez Prado? (Which will mean different, but not all that different, things when said to you at a cocktail party in 1957 versus a cocktail party in 1994. The question, like the music, has travelled, like a python, from the gullet past the midriff and into the Long Tail, with the friction of acquired kitsch to slow its journey. And actually, I quite enjoy the album he did with Rosemary Clooney.)

Listening to some more of Sam Rivers' work with Tony Williams during the KCR marathon…

In 1963, Miles Davis decided not to bring his west-coast pianist and drummer, Victor Feldman and Frank Butler, back east with him. They were replaced by Herbie Hancock and the 17-year-old Anthony Williams, the latter late of Jackie McLean's group, and this new configuration would re-record half of the album-in-progress, now known as Seven Steps to Heaven.

Skip forward a couple of years, and we get to these Rivers/Williams recordings; part of Spring features them with Hancock, Wayne Shorter (the tenorist who replaced Rivers in Davis' quintet; Rivers had briefly replaced George Coleman, from that west-coast quintet), and Gary Peacock, sometime substitute bassist in Davis' group.

Spring is playing on the radio, and it hits me: not only did Miles steal a great, great drummer from McLean (something he would repeat, years later, in replacing Williams with Jack DeJohnette), he stole the "time, no changes" vibe from Williams' recordings, and made it part of his own musical identity…

(This is not a complaint — it made for some of my favorite-est music ever.)

(And listening to a portion of Rivers' Fuchsia Swing Song recording sessions — done a few months after being let go by Miles — in which he inflicts all manner of harmonic substitution on the 12-bar blues, imposing his own wonderful tropos on the lineage of "Chasin' the Trane", I'd say everything went well in this game of musical chairs.)

…a musical identity that became the equivalent of Miles' famous non-gesture of "turning his back on the audience."

Of all Davis' mannerisms, the one that really got to fans and press was what they called "turning his back on the audience." Though he never actually played with his back turned -- films from the 1950's show him standing fully forward to the microphone, or at most, playing into it with an actor's three-quarter profile -- when he finished a solo he often walked to the back of the band or left the bandstand for the bar or a table. Jazz singer Eddie Jefferson even immortalized this demeanor by putting words to it: "Miles Davis walked off the stage!/That's what folks are saying. . .") Whatever he was doing was enough to have the audience whispering, and the meaning of their reaction was clear: had anyone in the history of Western performance ever dared to do that? Oh, maybe Hitler, but everyone understood that was Third Reich stage business, Nazi shtick. . . this, though, was something else. A performer -- and a Negro performer, at that -- was refusing to follow the fundamental etiquette of performance. He was declining to display graciousness and appreciation for the audience's attention and applause, refusing to acknowledge the special nature of their relationship -- refusing to show, in a word, humility.

And what resonance that simple gesture had! During a wind-up doll joke craze in the early 1960's, George Crater, a humorist with Down Beat magazine, asked the question: what does a Miles Davis doll do if you wind it up? Answer: it turns its back on you. Even in the global backwaters of the jazz world, they had heard of Miles' behavior. In Ved Mehta's Portrait of India he describes the vocalist with a Bombay jazz band singing "My Funny Valentine" with her back to the crowd because of the disdain in which she held Indian audiences. When Birdland seemed to be on the verge of eliminating jazz for rhythm and blues in 1964, the New York Daily News columnist Robert Sylvester quoted bartender Oscar Goodstein on "these icebox artists" who were not entertaining anyone. But, if Birdland does close out jazz, Sylvester said, "It's at least one less place in which the arrogant and hostile can turn their backs on people who made them rich and sputter through their sour, slobbering horns." With the Civil Rights Movement beginning in the same era, such a gesture took on added symbolism, that of a refusal to placate whites; and with the appearance of the Black Arts Movement of the early '60's, Miles could be seen as turning his back on all of Western civilization. Asked about why Miles left the stage after soloing, Dizzy Gillespie once said, "Why don't you ask him? And besides, maybe we'd all like to be like Miles and just haven't got the courage."

(All hail John Szwed.)

The back-turn, real or imagined, was Miles' version of $CURL_YOUR_LIP and/or $SHAKE_YOUR_HIPS, $ELVIS, and while it apparently resonated with the public, they didn't seem to want it applied to the actual music; this accelerated his trip down the Long Tail, and would result in various strategies in the subsequent decades to remedy the situation…

EDITZ: (20 May 2007) KCR is playing a long interview done on Friday with Hal Galper, the pianist in Rivers' Boston quartet during the late 50's and early 60's (Rivers' 1966 A New Conception album of transformed standards is a re-creation of a portion of their modus operandi; a vastly-underaged hard-bop drummer named Tony Williams joined the quartet early on, lasting until Jackie McLean heard him play). Aside from the goodies Galper has brought, such as the audio portion of the quartet's appearance on WGBH-TV, he confirms that "time, no changes" is something Rivers had worked out in the 50's — calling out, for example, "E Anything" on the bandstand meant a tonal center of E; this would be the only basis for improvisation.